Abstract

A plausible view about the epistemic condition of blameworthiness holds the following. Reasonable Expectation (RE): S's state of ignorance excuses iff S could not have been reasonably expected to have corrected or avoided the ignorance. An important, yet underexplored issue for RE concerns cases where an agent had the capacities and opportunities to have corrected or avoided the state of ignorance yet failed to do because of the difficulty involved. When does the fact that it was difficult for the agent to have corrected or avoided the ignorance make an expectation to have done so an unreasonable expectation? Addressing this question is important for understanding what RE implies for a broad range of interesting cases where non-ideal agents out in the real world are ignorant because of commonplace difficulties (e.g., cognitive biases, complexity of large bodies of evidence, and misinformation). Whether commonplace difficulties excuse is an interesting and important topic that a satisfactory account of the epistemic condition needs to address. This paper proposes and defends an irreducibly normative account of when difficulty precludes a reasonable expectation to know better. The paper then shows how this account can be used alongside empirical research to reveal what RE implies for important cases of ignorance had by real non-ideal agents.